Transitioning from conventional to optimized green solar-powered post-combustion carbon capture: A comprehensive life cycle assessment

• Lean Vapor Compression reduces total environmental impact by 48%, the best among all designs. • Two Stage Flash and Lean Vapor Compression cut global warming-related health impacts by over 50%. • Lean Vapor Compression shows the lowest toxicity, particulate matter, and water consumption impacts. • Two Stage Flash presents trade-offs from solar infrastructure despite strong carbon capture performance. • Reboiler and stripper energy use are the main environmental hotspots. Post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) is essential for reducing CO 2 emissions from fossil-fuel-based power generation, but its high energy demands raise important environmental concerns. This study evaluates the environmental performance of seven diglycolamine (DGA)-based PCC configurations implemented in a natural gas combined cycle power plant, using the ReCiPe 2016 Endpoint (H) method in SimaPro. Configurations include six entirely plant-powered designs and one solar-powered system. The Lean Vapor Compression (LVC) configuration achieved the best overall performance, reducing the total impact score by 48 % compared to the Standard configuration (from 3.38 to 1.75 milliPoints per kilowatt-hour, mPt/kWh, where mPt reflects a share of the annual environmental burden of an average global citizen). The solar-powered Two Stage Flash (TSF) also performed well (1.91 mPt/kWh), though with notable trade-offs. Both LVC and TSF reduced global warming-related human health impacts by over 50 % (from 1.45 × 10 −7 to ∼ 7.0 × 10 −8 DALY/kWh, with DALY representing years of healthy life lost due to environmental damage) and significantly lowered fossil resource scarcity (more than 60 %). LVC achieved the lowest fine particulate matter, water consumption, and human toxicity impacts, reduced by 41 %, 63 % and 40 % respectively. However, TSF performs poorly in those categories due to solar infrastructure impacts. Steam and electricity use were major contributors in most systems, with the reboiler and stripper identified as environmental hotspots.